Microsoft completed its $7.5 billion Bethesda acquisition earlier this week and initially hinted that “some new titles in the future” would be exclusive to Xbox and PC players. That some language left some wiggle room for the possibility of future Bethesda titles to appear on Sony’s PlayStation 5, Nintendo’s Switch, or elsewhere. Now, Microsoft’s Xbox chief, Phil Spencer, is making it very clear why the company paid $7.5 billion for Bethesda: Xbox Game Pass.
Not all Bethesda games will be exclusive to PC, Xbox and/or xCloud. Some will be multiplatform. Others, such as Deathloop and GhostWire: Tokyo, will initially be PS5 console exclusives. “There [are] contractual obligations that we’re gonna see through, as we always do in every one of these instances,” Spencer said. “We have games that exist on other platforms and we’re gonna go support those games on the platforms they’re on.”
He noted that Xbox will continue to invest in existing “communities of players” and added that there might be cases down the line where there are contractual obligations with other platforms. “Even in the future, there might be things that have either contractual things or legacy on different platforms that we’ll go do,” he said. Spencer previously said that Xbox will decide whether to release future Bethesda games on non-Xbox or PC platforms on a “case-by-case basis.”
It also emerged during the stream that more than 20 Bethesda games will be available to Xbox Game Pass subscribers as of Friday. A dozen more titles from the publisher will join the service, including Fallout 4.
